


The Love Affairs of Ghosts

by Tyleet



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-10
Updated: 2012-03-10
Packaged: 2017-11-01 18:33:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/359953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyleet/pseuds/Tyleet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A dead man comes to find a dead woman in America. They are not in love. </p><p>"I am collecting my debts," he tells her stiffly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Love Affairs of Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to exbex on LJ for beta-ing! Also, there is a Pablo Neruda quote slipped somewhere in the middle of this, which is taken from "Love Sonnet XI."

She catches the _Guardian_ headline informing her of his death on Kate Winslet's iPhone, and she doesn't believe it for a second--who better than the boffin detective, after all, to fake his own death? who better than her to know?--but even so, she's curious enough to check Dr. Watson’s blog while Kate is whimpering and straining in her bonds, and what she reads there leaves her cold.

  _He was my best friend and I’ll always believe in him_.

 She taught him that--how to leave your lover with nothing but a single brutal sentence--a cruelty he would never have dreamed of if she hadn't carved it into him a year ago.

   
It isn't until a week later when she steps into a cab and meets the driver's pale eyes in the mirror that the horror leaves her. Which is selfish, of course, but she's never claimed to be anything else.

"I am collecting on my debts," he tells her stiffly, taking a ferocious left hand turn that would scream Londoner in almost any other city in the world, and she smiles automatically and says "Of course, Mr. Holmes," but her heart is still beating too fast which means he probably knows she means _yes, for you, anything_.  
  
Ten minutes later they're pulling up to the Bank of New York, and she's striding through security with an ID from Sterling-Bosch while Sherlock slinks in through the service entrance in a blue uniform he's produced from nowhere. Her charm is delicate, like a syringe, and his is blunt, a hammer of emotion wielded by someone who does not understand it—but either way, it gets the job done, because in another fifteen minutes three men are dead and they’ve both unobtrusively left the building.

 Sherlock nods briskly and turns to walk away, but she calls him back, immediately. She hasn’t even had a chance to catalogue his changes yet—his hair is dishwater blonde, and he looks both gaunt and uncomfortable, standing on the wrong sidewalk in the wrong city, face expressionless. All she can think to say is "Aren't you going to tell me they were all bad, those men in there?" her voice dry with amusement she only half feels.

“You’re not an idiot,” he snaps, and she takes that for the gratitude it is, and risks brushing her fingers against his wrist and murmurs "Be in touch,” before letting him walk away.

 

 He isn't.

She tracks him down to three rat-trap hostels in two boroughs over the next week, each time arriving mere moments after he vanishes, before he gets impatient and interrupts her as she's leaving the Plaza. A huge white hand wraps around her arm and his voice is low and irritated in her ear, insisting that she _stop_ , she's attracting unwanted attention.

"New York's a big city," she reminds him, leaning into his side as they walk, a perfect picture of young-and-in-love for anyone watching. "Are you sure you don't want any more of my help?" She's certain that Moriarty’s Manhattan web extends far beyond the Bank of New York.

"Why should I trust you?" he asks guardedly, and she smiles involuntarily.

"Come to dinner with me," she says, and it's a mark of how desperate he must be that he agrees.

  
  
He does come to dinner, but he doesn't eat. He spends the entire evening pretending to sip a glass of water and really drinking her in, his eyes eating her up like a whole almond, peeling her bare and unlocking all the secrets she isn’t bothering to hide from him. She shivers and keeps smiling, and when it gets to be too much they get up and stroll to the Italian embassy and rip an art-racketeering ring wide open. They leave it wrapped up tidily for the relevant officials, pinned down neat as a butterfly on a card.

 

After that he doesn't bother hiding where he's staying, and after another three weeks she points out that living under the radar is one thing but she’s sure there are _lice_ in his _hair_. He goes pale and silently horrified and just like that, he starts sleeping on her sofa. She likes seeing him twist his long limbs into ridiculous positions, and when she catches him with his eyes closed it feels like a priceless gift--but an instant later they always flash open. He still doesn't quite trust her. She feels like someone leaving food out for a wild thing, gradually moving it closer to the door of the house, night after night, until the unsuspecting animal comes to eat it out of her palm. Look at him, she thinks, forgetting that he holds all the cards. As if he hadn't already laid her bare.

They kill more people who need to be killed, ruin the schemes and stratagems that Sherlock needs ruined. Irene manages to turn herself a tidy profit almost incidentally. Sherlock informs Rick Santorum that he’s a blithering idiot and almost blows his cover because he had no idea that the man was in the presidential race—that America was having a presidential race. Irene gives herself three new aliases, and gorgeous brunette lovers who do not love her to go with every one.  Between the two of them they’re almost never in at the same time, so she finally tells him to stop torturing his spine on the sofa and just sleep in the bed.

 

The first time she gets in beside him, he freezes, lying still in the dark. "Shh," she says, serious like she isn't, usually, with him, because sex is never something you should be frightened of. Unless that's what you want. "It's okay."

 "I don't want to have sex with you," he says, very quietly.

 "I know," she tells him, softly. "Go to sleep." It takes him a while, but he does. Probably more to prove a point than anything else, the silly man.

 When she wakes up in the middle of the night, he's wrapped tight around her, their legs tangled together and one of his arms folded around her waist, his breath soft and even against her neck. She shifts, and can feel the moment when he blinks awake. Instantly she brings a hand up to cradle the back of his head, thumb stroking at the base of his skull, words tumbling out of her mouth without her permission: _it's all right, it's okay, go back to sleep, it's fine, it's going to be all right_.

 He shudders minutely against her, and god, he must be exhausted, must be completely worn through with terror and grief, because he shuts his eyes--she can feel it against her skin--and does as he's told. She keeps it up for a while after that, fingers smoothing over his hair, a soft murmur of _it's going to be fine, we're going to fix everything, it's all going to be fine_ trailing out into the darkness of her room, until his breathing evens out.

   
They don't talk about it. They go to L.A. and Sherlock kills an infamous assassin with polonium and she seduces Natalie Portman and steals a Gutenberg Bible from the Huntington Library. He goes alone to Tokyo for two months and she gets him back for it by getting close--oh so close--to Moran in Australia, and when he finds out he doesn't speak to her for a week.

She learns that he can be soothed with sushi or the opera, that he is thrilled beyond words when she acquires an actual Stradivarius, but reluctantly tells her to return it. He is unfailingly insulting about her transformation from blackmailer to thief, and she is unfailingly happy to remind him of the circumstances of her career change, which makes him go dark faced and mutinous.

Beyond that, they don't mention the past. They don't have sex, but they have passports made up in shades of Mr. and Mrs. in five different names, from three different countries. She falls asleep on his shoulder on a plane, once, and when she wakes up he has a hand curled in her hair.  
  
  


But then they fly to Las Vegas so that Sherlock can decimate a drug cartel with ties to Moran and she can rob a casino, and before they've started anything, Sherlock gets a text message that makes him flush bright red and hurl his cell phone at the window of their hotel room, colliding midway with a lamp that shatters and sparks. Irene is on her feet in an instant. "Tell me," she says, voice hard, and he snarls wordlessly at her before hurling himself out of the room, door slamming shut. She's only an instant behind him, but it is difficult under the best of circumstances to find Sherlock Holmes when he doesn't want to be found, and impossible in a city like this one.

When she does find him, six hours later, he's managed to entirely blow their cover and somehow get the attention of the cartel and the casino _and the FBI_. Their identities are worthless, they're actually shot at, Irene only has one working credit card, Sherlock is inches away from accidentally revealing to the world that he isn't dead-- _which is exactly what will happen_ , she hisses, if their faces end up on the evening news. But he keeps going faster than ever, manic and vicious and talking in brilliant paragraphs that make a lunatic kind of sense. Before sunrise they've killed the people they need to kill, and are speeding into the desert in a stolen black Volvo. He won’t let her drive, even though she halfway suspects that he’s high on something.

"I detest the desert," he spits, and pushes down on the pedal until they're hurtling down the highway at eighty, eighty-five, ninety, and she tells him to stop, but he doesn't stop, so she says it again, this time in her command voice. She accompanies it with her hand on his throat. Sherlock glances at her in shock, and as she slowly and steadily applies pressure, he eases off the gas. Good.

When they're coasting at sixty-five, she tells him to pull off at the next exit, and keeps tightening her fingers. He guides them off the highway to the first lodgings they can see--a rundown American motel that meets neither of their standards--and by the time he turns off the ignition he's breathing in thin gasps, probably only a few minutes away from passing out.

"Get out of the car," she tells him evenly, and takes her fingers off his throat. She walks briskly into the motel office and puts a room for the night on their single working credit card, Sherlock hovering silent and bruised at her shoulder. She leads him to the garish, cheap door, unlocks it, and shuts it firmly behind them.

Sherlock's standing in the middle of the room, staring blankly at the bed.

"Take your belt off and give it to me," she tells him, and he doesn't move, looking lost.

"Irene," he begins unsteadily, and she hits him. Open-handed, across the face.

"If you want me to stop," she says seriously, "then you need to tell me to stop."

His face is already reddening, and she can read the need in his face, even as he tries to push it away. Not for her. For the feeling she can give him--being so grounded in his body that he won't have to think anymore, won't be able to feel anything but what she does to him. "Now, take your belt off and give it to me," she tells him, gently, and he does. 

She ends up tying him to the flimsy headboard with his socks, and the moment his arms are held over his head and he can't move anymore is when he starts shivering uncontrollably, and then she hits him, and she hits him again, and she unbuttons his shirt so she can get at the lovely skin of his torso, watch it turn flushed and pink and finally a deep, angry red.

He tries to be silent, at first.  But he wants to let go, and this is what she _does_.  Soon he’s gasping and moaning, deep and pained.  She slides his trousers off and strikes the backs of his knees, the soles of his feet.  He finally cries out, and she doesn’t stop, doesn’t stop.

Eventually she sets the belt aside and returns her fingers to his throat, waiting until every inch of him is screaming for oxygen before letting go, and when he gasps and gasps for air it makes her heart hurt, makes her lean in to kiss his temple while she's choking the life out of him. He whimpers and writhes and he isn’t hard but that’s fine because he doesn't want to fuck her and she doesn't want to fuck him, even though their bodies are broadcasting love with chemistry, pupils dilated, pulse quickened, flushed and aching and shuddering together. She doesn't make him beg, but he says her name in ways she's never heard it before, not from that mouth, _Irene_ , Irene.

When it's over he turns his head to the side and shudders, mouth red and wide, eyes screwed shut, his face streaked with involuntary tears. She unties his hands and lies down beside him and strokes the blood back into them, and he keeps trembling, and she smooths his sweaty hair out of his eyes and says, "Now, tell me."

His voice is hoarse, exhausted, very small. "He's getting married," he says, and keeps his eyes closed. No need to ask who _he_ is.

She pulls one of his unresisting hands to her chest, and places a soft kiss in the very center of his palm. “I love you,” she says, because he can read it in her body, and there’s no point pretending.

"Yes, I know," he whispers tiredly, and curls into her when she draws him closer.


End file.
